Chinese general backs the American dream

John Garnaut, Beijing

A CHINESE general has warned his conservative Communist Party masters and People's Liberation Army colleagues that China can either embrace American-style democracy or accept Soviet-style collapse.

While officers of similar rank have been rattling their sabres against US aircraft carriers in the Yellow and South China seas, General Liu Yazhou says China's rise depends on adopting America's system of government rather than challenging its presence off China's eastern coast.

''If a system fails to let its citizens breathe freely and release their creativity to the maximum extent, and fails to place those who best represent the system and its people into leadership positions, it is certain to perish,'' writes General Liu in the Hong Kong magazine, Phoenix, which is widely available on news stands and on the internet throughout China.

His article suggests China's political and ideological struggles are more lively than commonly thought, and comes before a rotation of leaders in the Central Military Commission and then the Politburo in 2012.

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''The secret of US success is neither Wall Street nor Silicon Valley, but its long-surviving rule of law and the system behind it,'' he says. ''The American system is said to be 'designed by genius and for the operation of the stupid'. A bad system makes a good person behave badly, while a good system makes a bad person behave well. Democracy is the most urgent; without it there is no sustainable rise.''

General Liu was recently promoted from deputy Political Commissar of the PLA Airforce to Political Commissar of the National Defence University. His father was a senior PLA officer and his father-in-law was Li Xiannian, one of China's ''Eight Immortals'' and one time president of China.

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While many of China's ''princelings'' have exploited their revolutionary names to amass wealth and family power, General Liu has exploited his pedigree to provide political protection to push his contrarian and reformist views.

But his article is extraordinary by any standards. It urges China to shift its strategic focus from the country's developed coastal areas including Hong Kong and Taiwan - ''the renminbi belt'' - and towards the resource-rich central Asia. But he argues that China will never have strategic reach by relying on wealth alone.

''A nation that is mindful only of the power of money is a backward and stupid nation,'' he writes. ''What we could believe in is the power of the truth. The truth is knowledge and knowledge is power.''

But such national power can only come with political transformation. ''In the coming 10 years, a transformation from power politics to democracy will inevitably take place,'' he writes.

''China will see great changes. Political reform is our mission endowed by history. We have no leeway. So far, China has reformed all the easy parts and everything that is left is the most difficult; there is a landmine at every step.''

General Liu inverts the lesson that Chinese politicians have traditionally drawn from the collapse of the Soviet Union - that it was caused by too much political reform - by arguing reform arrived too late.

''Stability weighed above everything and money pacified everything, but eventually the conflict intensified and everything else overwhelmed stability,'' he writes.

Since 2008 the Communist Party has steadily tightened the political screws to stifle all manner of civil organisation and dissent. Many Chinese are concerned that China's political reforms have been blocked by powerful military, corporate and princeling interest groups that benefit from the status quo.

General Liu was famously outspoken until he stopped publishing his essays about five years ago. Sources close to General Liu say those early published essays have cost him opportunities for promotion.

It is unclear how his latest article appeared in Phoenix and whether he has backing from allies within the system. Last year, Hong Kong's Open magazine published a leaked report of one of General Liu's internal speeches which raised the taboo topic of how some generals refused to lead troops into Tiananmen Square in 1989.

General Liu returned to the subject of Tiananmen in his Phoenix article, writing that ''a nationwide riot'' was caused by the incompatibility of China's traditional power structures with reform.